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Talk:Ratter
Problems with this article (warning: spoilers) I am here to fix a double redirect ("The Golden Monkey" in this article redirects to "Golden Monkey", which in turn redirects to "Marisa Coulter's dæmon"; meaning that on clicking the link, the redirect chain is automatically broken by Wikia as the target is another redirect).† However, there are numerous other problems with this article which need to be addressed, and which I feel are worth noting: *'Most of it is in the present tense'. Even if we didn't have a style policy requiring that all pages be uniformly written in the past tense to avoid confusion, this would be wrong because Tony (and hence Ratter) dies before the end of the first book. *'"Ratter rarely ever change shape, so the doctors of Bolvangar think they are older than they believed to be (in fact they weren't sure at all)."' In that form, this sentence doesn't make sense; the first "they" are clearly Tony and Ratter, so the second "they" can be presumed to be the doctors — but this leads to the contradiction that the doctors thought that the pair were older than the doctors thought they were! I've reworked the sentence to make it explicit who is being referred to, and replaced "believed" with "appeared" which I think is what was meant. *'"Tony isn't very thoughtful, and so ''neither is his dæmon; they're both not neither of them really creative, too either."' The original sentence was clear in meaning but clumsy; in the above the original wording is struck through and my replacements in ''italics. *'"Ratter is only seen in the forms of a sparrow and a mouse."' Wrong, and a very common error; she's not seen in both forms at once, so the "and" should be "or". *'"At their home village, Ratter and Tony always have to steal their food from markets."' Villages don't (that I've ever heard of) have daily markets; market day is usually once a week. Daily markets only occur in large towns; I got the impression when reading Northern Lights that the market scene was in somewhere like Stepney (just east of Central London), or the equivalent of Stepney in Lyra's world. (Partly because, if I remember, it was in or near dockland.) *(On Tony's escape after his intercision) "When Lyra finds him, he is completly sick." What extra sense does "completely" convey? Surely "very" is more apt. *'"In the film, she first appears at the front of Jordan"'. Pronoun misuse again; since the previous paragraph mentioned Lyra, the unwary reader could take Lyra to be whom was meant by "she" in this sentence. Better to make it explicit. RobertATfm (talk) 23:57, July 12, 2012 (UTC) †This is done automatically as a safety feature; otherwise a careless or malicious user could tie up the system by having two pages play redirect tennis by redirecting to each other. ---- Remaining problem Another ambiguous pronoun, in the final paragraph: "In the film, Ratter first appeared at the front of Jordan College, playfully fighting with Salcilia and Pantalaimon. Later, when Roger and Billy were waiting for Lyra to bring out the "poisonous" cape, Billy told her to check if the nightwatcher was coming." Who is "her" in the above — Ratter or Lyra? — RobertATfm (talk) 00:20, July 13, 2012 (UTC)